I don’t know. Maybe I’m the optimist. I checked my email when I got back from the Paradiso last night and again before I left this morning for rehearsal. There was an email from Yael, and a forwarded joke from Henk, and a bunch of the usual junk, but nothing from Skev or Tor. What exactly did I expect?
I’m not even sure what there is to be optimistic about. If the letter is from her, what’s to say it’s not a long-distance piss off? She’d have every right.
We break for lunch and I check my phone. Broodje’s texted to say he’s heading off on some wooden sailing boat and he’ll be incommunicado for a few days, but he’ll be back in Amsterdam next week. Daniel’s also texted to let me know he’s arrived safely in Brazil, and forwarded a photo of Fabiola’s belly. Tomorrow, I vow, I’m getting a phone that accepts pictures.
Petra forbids mobile phones in rehearsal. But when she’s talking to Jeroen, I put my ringer to vibrate and slip my phone into my pocket anyway. Optimist indeed.
Around five o’clock, the drizzle lets up and Linus resumes the rehearsal. We’re having trouble with the light cues, which we can’t see. Because the show starts at dusk and goes into the night, the lights come up halfway through, so tomorrow’s rehearsal will be from two in the afternoon to midnight, so we can make sure the second half, the in-darkness part, is properly lit.
At six, my phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket. Max widens her eyes at me. “Cover me,” I whisper, and scuttle off to the wings.
It’s Skev.
“Hey, thanks for getting back to me,” I whisper.
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice dropped to a whisper, too.
“Amsterdam? You?”
“Back in Brighton. Why are we whispering?”
“I’m in a rehearsal.”
“For what?”
“Shakespeare.”
“In Amsterdam. Fuck, that’s cool. I gave that shit up. I’m working at a Starbucks now.”
“Oh, shit, sorry.”
“Nah, it’s all good, man.”
“Listen, Skev, I can’t talk long but I ran into Bex.”
“Bex.” He whistles. “How is that sweet thing?”
“Same as always, hooked up with a juggler. She mentioned a letter Tor was trying to get to me. Earlier in the year.”
There’s a pause. “Victoria. Man. She is something else.”
“I know.”
“I asked if I could come back and she said no. Just that one time. Off season. Don’t shit where you eat.”
“I know. I know. About that letter . . .”
“Yeah, man, I don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh.”
“Victoria wouldn’t tell me. Said it was personal. You know how she gets.” He sighs. “So I just told her to send it you. I gave her the address on the boat. I didn’t know if you could get mail on the boat.”
“You could. We could. We did.”
“So you got the letter?”
“No, Skev. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Well, it must be at the boat, man.”
“But we don’t live there anymore. Haven’t done for a while.”
“Oh, shit. Forgot it was empty. Sorry about that.”
“No worries, man.”
“Break a leg with your Shakespeare and shit.”
“Yeah, you too—with your cappuccinos and all.”
He laughs. Then we say good-bye.
I go back to the rehearsal. Max is looking crazed. “I told them you had to puke. The Flunky is mad you didn’t ask first. I wonder if he calls Petra for permission before he makes love to his wife.”
It’s an image I do my best not to conjure. “I owe you. I’ll tell Linus it was a false alarm.”
“You gonna tell me what this is about?”
I think of Lulu, all the wild-goose chases this year that have led nowhere. Why would this be anything else?
“Probably just what you said: a false alarm,” I tell Max.
• • •
Except that probably becomes a pebble in my shoe, aggravating me for the rest of the day, making it hard to keep from thinking about the letter, where it is, what it says, who it’s from. By the time rehearsal ends, I feel this sort of urgency to know; so even though the rain has returned, and even though I’m bone tired, I decide to try Marjolein. She doesn’t answer her phone and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. She lives close by, on the ground floor of a wide house in a posh neighborhood at the south end of the park. She’s always told me to drop by any time.
“Willem,” she says, opening the door. She has a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and she doesn’t seem so happy that I’ve dropped by. I’m dripping wet, and she doesn’t invite me in. “What brings you here?”
“Sorry to bother you but I’m trying to find a letter.”
“A letter?”
“That was sent to the boat, some time in the spring.”
“Why are you still getting mail at the boat?”
“I’m not. Someone just sent it there.”
She shakes her head. “If it went to the boat, it would’ve been forwarded to the office and then on to the address you provided us.”
“In Utrecht?”
She sighs. “Probably. Can you call me in the morning?”
“It’s important.”
She sighs. “Try Sara. She handles the mail.”
“Do you have Sara’s number?”
“I’d have thought you’d have Sara’s number,” she says.
“Not for a long time now.”
She sighs. Then reaches for her mobile. “Don’t start anything up with her.”
“I won’t,” I promise.
“Right. You’re a changed man.” I can’t quite get whether she’s being sarcastic or not.
Inside, the music changes, from mellow jazz to something wilder with screaming trumpets. Marjolein looks longingly inside. I realize that she’s not alone.
“I’ll let you go,” I say.
She leans forward to kiss good-bye. “Your mother will be pleased I saw you.”
She starts to close the door. “Can I ask you something? About Yael?”
“Sure,” she says absently, her attention already back in the warm house and on whomever’s waiting in there.
“Did she, I don’t know, do things, to help me, that I didn’t know about?”
Her face is half hidden in shadows, but her toothy smile shines in the reflected light. “What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
Marjolein shakes her head. “Then neither can I.” She starts to close the door. Then she stops. “But did you consider in all those months you were gone, why your bank account never ever went to zero?”
I hadn’t considered it, not really. I rarely used my bank card but when I did, it always worked.
“Someone was always watching,” Marjolein says. When she shuts the door, she’s still smiling.
Forty-one
Utrecht
Everything takes too long. The train is late. The bike share line is too long. So I catch a bus instead and it stops to pick up every old lady in town. I shouldn’t have left so late, but it was already late when I got hold of Sara this morning. Then it took a bit of cajoling before she finally remembered there was a letter. No, she didn’t read it. No, she didn’t remember where it came from. But she thinks she forwarded to the address on file. The one in Utrecht. Not that long ago.
By the time I get to Bloemstraat, it’s almost noon. The second tech rehearsal is at 2:00 back in Amsterdam. I have nothing but time in my life, but never enough of it when I need it.
I ring the eyeball bell. There’s no answer. I have no idea who lives here anymore. I texted Broodje on the train over but he didn’t answer. Then I remembered that he’s in the middle of the Aegean somewhere. With Candace. Whose name he knows, whose telephone number and email address he got before he left Mexico.